What Users Want for the Cloud

Because it’s the first-ever CloudOpen, we wanted to understand what users really want when it comes to building their cloud infrastructure and platforms and what they expect from vendors. We thought this information could be useful for this week’s event attendees, so today we’re releasing a handful of data points we surfaced in partnership with IDC from a survey, the IDC 2012 Cloud System Software Survey (forthcoming), conducted this summer. IDC received responses from 282 U.S. enterprises that have deployed or are interested in private cloud and that have 500 or more employees.
 
The results confirm that enterprise users feel openness in the cloud is important. They want to participate in an open ecosystem and value open source software, standards and APIs for their cloud infrastructure and platforms. This is simply what they expect due to two transformative decades of software development thanks to the rise of Linux and open source software. Today, collaborative development isn’t one way to build software; it’s the only way that produces the very best technologies.
 
Look for more data and information on this topic in the coming weeks. IDC will be publishing a paper with The Linux Foundation’s sponsorship that includes these results and other data points that can help inform project, vendor and partner strategies for the open cloud. You can also attend IDC Analyst Gary Chen’s presentation this week at CloudOpen to get more insight on the survey and his perspective on this data. Gary is speaking on Thursday at 2:25 p.m. about the Role of Openness in Cloud Systems Software.
 
When we announced CloudOpen, I blogged about why this event is so important and why now. We’re experiencing a major technology shift in IT, one that opens the door for users to lose the freedom and choice they’ve come to expect after two decades of Linux and open source software innovation. Open cloud projects and a variety of vendors are joining together to fight to sustain that freedom and build an open cloud, and we hope that CloudOpen is ground zero for those efforts.
 
If you can’t join us this week in person, please watch our live stream.

And, you can also get live event coverage and join the conversation real-time this week on Linux.com.